Oh well whatever nevermind

Last week, NPR hosted a conversation about the ’90s music revival apparently underway in growing circles, and how kids who grew up listening to Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” and Nirvana’s “In Utero” are now incorporating 20-year-old tunes into TV shows. Music critic Ann Powers described that era as “the last gasp of the conventional music industry before the Web changed everything. There’s a certain wistfulness about the ’90s revivalism in music – why can’t we have the monoculture back, this idea of mass culture that unites millions of people, not only in terms of what they’re consuming, but in terms of what gives meaning to their cultural lives?”

It’s about time — the Nineties are back at last!/CREDIT: generationbass.com

The Web changed more than music, and that certain wistfulness might also explain the anticipation behind the return of Art Bell to the late-night airwaves, beginning on Sirius XM tonight. What a gloriously freaky era, that stage for Bell’s theater. Was there ever, in the history of radio, a three-word reaction – didn’t matter to what, a time-traveler phone-in from the year 2036, maybe, an imminent Y2K computer catastrophe, messages left on the anti-Christ hotline – delivered with more melodrama than Art Bell’s signature “Oh.” Pause. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. “My.” Milk curdling loudly in the lower tract. “God.” And you could hear a pin drop in slow-motion, even amid the atmospheric static sweeping the AM band.

“I think the difficulty with the 90s revival,” said NPR’s Powers, “is no one can agree on what the most important landmarks are.” That’s probably true. But for a generation of insomniacs, Bell’s “Coast to Coast AM” show rocked the third shift like nothing ever will again. At the peak of the craze, some 500 stations and 15 million listeners were invested in every hushed revelation. The conspiracy-addled Bell curve flourished amid the perfect storm of Ruby Ridge and Branch Davidians and Timothy McVeigh, at a moment “The X-Files'” UFO-chasing FBI agents leaped from cult hit to mainstream branding: Trust No One. Deny Everything. The Truth Is Out There. But who could tell The Truth from the script?

What we had instead was Art Bell on the radio, the unflinching passenger filling the vacuum on endless midnight drives to some place that kept getting farther away beneath stars glittering with menace or ambrosia, depending maybe on your mood, your luck, or maybe the coffee. And by late 1996, the show was about to attain full bloom.

That’s when an amateur astronomer swore to Art Bell Nation he’d detected an object with a “Saturn-like ring” following newly-discovered comet Hale-Bopp. Emory University social scientist Courtney Brown announced to Bell’s listeners his remote-viewing team had identified the UFO as an alien spaceship. By March 1997, Americans from, well, coast to coast were stepping out into the early evening to enjoy the rare cosmic spectacle. In Phoenix, things went flat-out sideways. Uncounted residents found themselves gaping at a humongous treetop-level UFO for which no explanation has emerged. And on March 26, when the hammer fell, it was immune to parody. San Diego-area cops discovered the corpses of 39 communal members of Heaven’s Gate, a cybersect that placidly ingested arsenic and cyanide so that their souls could hitch a ride with the non-existent Hale-Bopp UFO. Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of “Star Trek” star Nichelle Nichols.

Now that’s the kind of entertainment you just can’t make up. Bell would pack it in, a rich man, around the time the bombs started raining on Baghdad. By then, the Internet had exploded, reality was up for grabs, and the captive mass audience was free to slurp its nutrients from the biases of its choice. Poor Richard “Dick” Seed, that born-too-early maverick physicist. In 1997, at age 69, he ignited a firestorm by announcing his intentions to clone himself before the law could stop him. Sixteen years later, we clone ourselves routinely, preening in cyberspace, where eternal life is never more than a mouseclick away.

So anyhow, yeah. The spirit of the Nineties is back. But the landscape of the nostalgia party is clouded by digital-native CGI artists so skilled and ubiquitous you’re crazy to believe your own eyes anymore. Even the title of Art Bell’s new show, “Dark Matter,” comes from a term that didn’t exist — podcast — in his heyday. (“Dark Matters Radio” was co-founded in 2004 by veteran UFO researcher Don Ecker. But no matter.) The margins are clogged now with UFOs and paranoia and video games that play like lucid dreams and the shock value is gone and state surveillance is a fact of life and everybody is a star. And the man who spun the fringe into solid gold is driven by different imperatives today. “I don’t need the money,” Bell told the Las Vegas Sun. “I’m doing this for fun.”

Ahh, those Nineties, the precognitive quiet before the storm, back when the lines all seemed fresh and new. “Deep Throat said ‘trust no one.’ And that’s hard, Scully,” Fox Mulder lamented. “Suspecting everyone, everything, it wears you down. You even begin to doubt what you know is the truth. Before, I could only trust myself. Now, I can only trust you … and they’ve taken you away from me.”

You have missed the main point. I listened to Art for years and years. I even made housing decisions based on picking up his show. And he was the Patron Saint of Insomniacs. But mostly Art is a live radio genius. He lived and breathed radio from childhood and only Limbaugh comes close for ability. It did not matter if you agreed with the topic or guest or not. Personally I liked the hard science shows the best. But for people in Pain-physical, mental, emotional, or all of the above, Art got us through the worst of the night, so we could make it until dawn. Over the years hundreds tried to thank him on the air. He cut us all off, which I think I understand. I just hope he has some idea of just how much he helped those 15 million listeners, rather they were on an old night drive or living in severe chronic pain, just trying to get through the night. Welcome back Art!